“Come, come,” said Birger, “if you go to statistics, look at home. Your Mr. Hume moved, last session, for a return of all the men that had been picked up, drunk, in the course of the preceding year; and, in Glasgow alone, there were nearly fifteen thousand—that is to say, one out of every twenty-two of the whole population. Do not talk to us of drunkenness. Did you ever hear of the controversy between the pot and the kettle?”
“The Scotch are no more our countrymen, than the Norwegians are yours,” said the Parson; “and, if I recollect right, that very return gave no more than one in every six hundred, picked up, drunk, in our Manchester; and Manchester is not what we call a moral place, either.”[14]
“In that very place, Glasgow,” said the Captain, “where, for my sins, I was quartered last year, I was actually taken up before the magistrates, and fined five shillings, for what the hypocritical sinners call ‘whustling on the Saubboth,’ and it was only Saturday night, either—the rascally Jews! They are fellows to
Compound for sins they are inclined to
By damning those they have no mind to.
The scoundrels couldn’t whistle a tune themselves on any day of the week, ‘were it their neck verse at Hairibee;’ they have no notion of music, beyond the bagpipe and the Scotch fiddle.”
“Five shillings?” said the Parson, musingly; “that is just the sum they fine people, in London, for being drunk and disorderly.”
“Then, in all human probability, the Captain made one individual item in Mr. Hume’s fifteen thousand himself.”
“Very possibly,” said the Captain. “It was Saturday night, and I will not say I might not have been a little screwed. When one is in Turkey one must live as turkeys live.”